DAYTON, Ohio — After the miracle he conceived went precisely according to plan, after guard Pe’Shon Howard dribbled the length of the court uninterrupted and tossed in a 24-foot 3-point shot that gave the Southern California Trojans an invigorating road win, Andy Enfield worked overtime to be construed as humble in his assessment what transpired.

“We had an instance of this in our last game where we had 4 seconds left and we shot the ball too early,” Enfield said. “So we emphasized taking a couple extra dribbles and making sure we got in shooting range. It was a heck of a shot, but it’s not a shot you make every day.

Andy Enfield (AP Photo)

“We’re fortunate to win this game. I thought Dayton — I thought both teams — played terrific basketball. They played hard, and what a great atmosphere. We’re just fortunate to be on the winning side.”

After all that’s happened in the past few months, observing it from a distance, humility is not the quality one expects upon encountering Enfield.

Following his lottery-ticket-style rise to coaching stardom, winning two games in the NCAA Tournament at Florida Gulf Coast and suddenly becoming one of the hottest candidates on the spring carousel, Enfield accepted an enticing and lucrative offer to take over the program at one of the great private universities in America. USC has everything a coach could want: excellent facilities, a rich talent base, an inviting conference, a smidge of recent success. There’s only been that once catch: Trojans fans haven’t usually been fans of Trojans basketball.

It’s been a tough sell most of the past two decades. So it would have been a reasonable strategy to roll into SoCal, pick a few fights, get the cameras pointed at USC basketball, see what happens.

Yeah, but that’s not what’s going on. The comments he made privately to a booster group about UTEP coach Tim Floyd being forlorn at living in El Paso and coveting the SC job and that being the reason Floyd publicly alleged the Trojans had tampered with a recruit — well, it wasn’t wise to say those things when a writer from Men’s Journal was shadowing him for a magazine article. The quick challenge he issued one day in preseason practice to either run harder to fit the Trojans’ new fastbreak style or go play slow at UCLA — well, it wasn’t wise to say that with a reporter from the San Jose Mercury News in the gym.

“I need to do a better job of what I say, who I say it to, where I say it and the context it’s said in,” Enfield told Sporting News. “That’s not my personality. It’s on me. Obviously, I never thought that would be in the press. It’s on me. I have to do a better job.”

The backlash to the Floyd comments was rather unattractive, including a confrontation between the UTEP and USC coaching staffs when they competed in the same tournament last month in the Bahamas. Whether anything will grow from the flippant remark about UCLA’s approach to the game — it was meant to be at least partially humorous; in fact, the Bruins are seventh in the nation in scoring — will be better known soon after the New Year, when they meet in the Pac-12 opener at Pauley Pavilion.

“UCLA is a great rivalry with USC. They have terrific players. They have an excellent basketball coach and they have great tradition,” Enfield said. “It’s our job at USC to build our program. We’d like to compete this year to go to an NCAA Tournament and for a Pac-12 championship. But UCLA’s been ranked, and we haven’t been this year, so I give them credit.

“We need to elevate our basketball team so when we do play UCLA it’s a national rivalry. It’s always going to be a local rivalry, a regional rivalry. We need to mean something on a national scale.”

Sunday was a small but significant step in that direction. Following a 72-71 road loss to Long Beach State, the Trojans were stuck heading to Dayton for what appeared to be another likely defeat: long trip, full arena, quality opponent. In the history of UD Arena, 11 teams from California had traveled in for a game; all 11 headed back to the sunshine with an extra “L” on their records.

The coach who brought you Dunk City while at FGCU, however, now is presenting his version of Zone City. The Trojans played multiple defenses, with a 2-3 zone getting most of the work and working most effectively. USC was active enough, and the Flyers probed it meekly enough, that UD shot just 37.3 percent from the field and missed 17 3-point attempts in a 79-76 Trojans overtime win.

“Man is my favorite defense, but I do like to mix it up with zones,” Enfield said. “I don’t think we can play one defense the entire game; we’re just not good enough to do that. We don’t have all the size and length and athleticism that some teams might have. We do that out of necessity, but I thought our guys played really hard.”

Even out of the zone defense, which lengthened many of Dayton’s possessions, the Trojans were aggressive in pushing the pace. There were only nine fast-break points, but wing Byron Wesley attacked the rim eagerly with right- and left-hand drives that led to 26 points, and guards Howard, Julian Jacobs and J.T. Terrell fired shots that at times could be construed as daring.

“Freedom,” is what Wesley called it. After playing for ball-control coach Kevin O’Neill, many of the Trojans relish Enfield’s less rigid approach to offense.

“Coach Enfield has been a class act,” Wesley said, even after he’d been benched at the start of this game for what Enfield termed a coach’s decision — the decision being that Wesley needed to play with greater energy and serve his teammates.

“It’s nothing like KO,” Wesley said. “He basically just sat me down and told me how he feels. Coach Enfield’s not really a big yeller. He’s really honest, and he’ll let me know. He told me he wasn’t pleased with my performance, and that’s why I came out and played better.”

The Trojans are 8-4 following Sunday’s result, with some quality victories and some hard-to-defend defeats. Wesley told Sporting News his goal for the Trojans entering the season was to finish in the upper half of the Pac-12 and compete for an NCAA Tournament berth. They would appear to at least be in the fight.

“Ever since he came in, he’s just been really positive,” Wesley said. “I just like the vibe and the overall energy. He’s kind of tweaked our offense, made us a lot more transition-oriented, just lets us play. I’ve had blast so far.”